Sometimes I get in trouble when I don’t see what is really happening around me; when I don’t see and acknowledge what is right before my eyes. When I finally do see it, usually after suffering a significant amount of pain, I spend a lot of time and energy asking myself mostly unhelpful critical questions like, “Why am I so blind”, “How could I have missed that”, even calling myself names like “Stupid”, etc.

Have you ever done that?

I learned something recently that helped me give myself, and others, a bit of a break from this critical self-talk. I recently went to my ophthalmologist to check out a ‘floater’ that suddenly appeared in one of my eyes. My floater was a black hairy looking thing that I could see when I looked up from reading. It seemed to be about a half inch long, and looked like an inverted eyelash.

When I went to the eye doctor he said, “Yep, I can see what you are talking about”. He went on to say, “After a few weeks you won’t notice it anymore”.

I asked, “You mean it goes away?”

He said “No, it doesn’t go away, it will always be there, it is just that after a while your brain will just choose to not see it any more”.

I was stunned.

I walked out of his office realizing for the first time, that denial is a normal human function. It was as if my brain was having a conversation with itself that went something like this. “Well there it is (the floater), there is nothing I can do to change it, it doesn’t seem to be hurting anything, so I will just choose to pretend it isn’t there”.

Then I thought to myself, if my brain makes decisions to do that with something like a floater, I guess I shouldn’t judge myself so harshly for automatically using the same coping mechanism in other aspects of my life.